[eyb] you continue magnificently helpful!

[kaberett]

The context for yesterday's frivolous low-stakes question was of course indexing for Eat Your Books, where I've been stalled on my current cookbook for... a while... for ...reasons... including but not limited to needing to ask for a bunch of new ingredients to be added, and then having a social anxiety about ever touching the work-in-progress again.

And then I did touch it again! And a recipe where I'd requested the new ingredient "mixed leaf salad" had instead... been given the ingredient "mixed greens", synonymous with the base ingredient "mixed lettuces".

The cookbook in question is The National Trust Cookbook; The recipe is Goat's cheese tartlets with pickled cucumber; the headnote to the recipe includes

Serve with a home-grown asparagus, pea and broad bean salad mixed with baby salad leaves.

The ingredients for the salad, helpfully listed under the subheading "To serve", are:

12 spears of English asparagus, woody ends trimmed off 55g/2oz podded broad beans 85g/3oz fresh or frozen peas 70g/2½oz mixed leaf salad with rocket leaves 3 tbsp extra virgin rapeseed or olive oil 1 tsp runny honey

So I am reassured that the breakdown of opinions falls almost entirely along side-of-the-pond lines, suggesting that the reason I'm going "this is neither of these two things??? if EYB told me I needed mixed greens for a recipe and turned out to mean mixed leaf salad I'd be extremely annoyed??? if a recipe told me I needed mixed greens for a recipe and turned out to mean lettuces--" because, yes, I think "mixed greens" are a thing that need cooking (probably referring to brassica but I only roll my eyes a little at pre-packaged bowls that decide that various forms of pea, broccoli, and leek also count), and "mixed lettuces" is a strictly narrower category than "mixed leaf salad".

I had absolutely no idea that this might be a point of US/UK confusion, and thank you all for providing me with Data!

Comments

[phi]

... It would never occur to me that mixed greens, with no other modifier, would require cooking. Mixed hardy greens, mixed winter greens, mixed dark greens, okay any of those could mean any subset of the vast cornucopia of brassicas that require cooking to be palatable.